India T20I wicketkeeper dismissals record: All-Time Records

MS Dhoni kept wicket in 77 T20Is for India and took 84 dismissals in them: 50 catches and 34 stumpings. The catches are unremarkable for a keeper of that standing. The stumpings are not. Two in every five of Dhoni's T20I dismissals came from a batter's back foot leaving the crease, a proportion no other India keeper approaches and one that says more about how he read a game than any aggregate does.

Rishabh Pant is second on 44 from 33 matches behind the stumps, Sanju Samson third on 41 from 43. Both are well short of Dhoni's total and both have better per-match rates, which is the usual shape of a leaderboard where the leader played longest.

Wicketkeeping is the one fielding role where volume is largely handed to you: keep in enough matches against enough edges and the total accumulates. What separates keepers is the stumping, which cannot be accumulated passively. It requires a keeper standing up, a spinner turning the ball past the bat, and a decision made in a fraction of a second. That is the column to read first.

Most T20I dismissals by an India wicketkeeper

Rank	Keeper	Span	Matches kept	Catches	Stumpings	Dismissals	Per match
1	MS Dhoni	2006-2019	77	50	34	84	1.09
2	Rishabh Pant	2017-2024	33	33	11	44	1.33
3	Sanju Samson	2015-2026	43	35	6	41	0.95
4	Dinesh Karthik	2006-2022	21	25	8	33	1.57
5	Ishan Kishan	2021-2026	28	25	5	30	1.07
6	KL Rahul	2016-2022	17	17	1	18	1.06
7	Jitesh Sharma	2023-2025	12	8	1	9	0.75
8	Dhruv Jurel	2024-2025	3	3	1	4	1.33
9	Parthiv Patel	2011	1	1	0	1	1.00

Matches kept counts only those in which the player took the gloves, not every T20I he played. Several names here — Samson, Rahul, Kishan and Karthik especially — appeared in many more matches as specialist batters with somebody else keeping, and catches they took in the field are excluded from this table.

The stumping share

Keeper	Dismissals	Stumpings	Stumpings as share of dismissals
MS Dhoni	84	34	40%
Dhruv Jurel	4	1	25%
Rishabh Pant	44	11	25%
Dinesh Karthik	33	8	24%
Ishan Kishan	30	5	17%
Sanju Samson	41	6	15%
Jitesh Sharma	9	1	11%
KL Rahul	18	1	6%

MS Dhoni's 34 stumpings are the most by any keeper in T20 internationals, from any country. The share is the more revealing figure: 40 per cent against a field where 25 is high. Dhoni kept to Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Yuzvendra Chahal and Harbhajan Singh across a period when India bowled a great deal of spin in the middle overs, and he stood up to the stumps in situations where most keepers of the era stood back.

KL Rahul's single stumping in 17 matches kept is the other end of the same story. He kept largely in overseas conditions where India played an extra seamer, and a keeper standing back to pace has almost no stumping opportunities. The figure reflects the bowling in front of him rather than his glovework.

Rate against volume

Dinesh Karthik's 1.57 dismissals per match kept is the highest in the table, from 21 matches. Rishabh Pant is next at 1.33 from 33. Both sit above Dhoni's 1.09, and neither figure should be read as a verdict on the three keepers.

Karthik kept in a scattered set of appearances spread over sixteen years, many of them in matches where India's bowling was taking wickets in volume. Pant's 33 came in a concentrated run between 2017 and 2024. Dhoni's 77 include a long stretch in the format's early years when India defended low totals and edges went to slip rather than to the keeper. A keeper's dismissal rate moves with the attack, the pitch and the era, and the sample sizes here range from 3 matches to 77.

Sanju Samson's 0.95 is the lowest rate among keepers with more than twenty matches, and his 43 matches kept are the second most of anyone on the list. He has kept mostly since 2023, to an attack led by Arshdeep Singh and Varun Chakaravarthy, and to a great deal of wrist spin that produces catches at slip and in the ring rather than behind the stumps.

Who they kept against

Keeper	Leading opponents by catches
MS Dhoni	Australia 10, Pakistan 9, Sri Lanka 9, New Zealand 6
Rishabh Pant	England 7, South Africa 7, West Indies 6, New Zealand 6
Sanju Samson	Sri Lanka 8, West Indies 6, South Africa 5, Zimbabwe 4
Ishan Kishan	New Zealand 11, Zimbabwe 4, West Indies 3, Ireland 3
Dinesh Karthik	Pakistan 6, South Africa 4, Sri Lanka 4, West Indies 3
KL Rahul	New Zealand 5, Sri Lanka 4, Bangladesh 4, Australia 4

Ishan Kishan's eleven against New Zealand is the most lopsided distribution on the list and comes almost entirely from bilateral series in India. Dhoni's spread across Australia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka maps onto the fixtures of his era, when those were the three sides India met most often in the format.

Where they kept

Keeper	Matches kept	Kept in India	Kept overseas
MS Dhoni	77	27	50
Sanju Samson	43	15	28
Rishabh Pant	33	13	20
Ishan Kishan	28	18	10
Dinesh Karthik	21	6	15
KL Rahul	17	6	11

Only Kishan has kept a majority of his matches at home, which reflects a career that has so far been built on bilateral series in India rather than on global tournaments. Everyone else follows India's fixture pattern in the format, which sends the side abroad for World Cups and for most of its away calendar.

Four observations

The dismissal record and the stumping record are not really the same achievement, and India's list makes that unusually clear. Dhoni holds both, but his lead in stumpings is proportionally far larger than his lead in dismissals — he has three times as many stumpings as the next keeper and less than twice as many total dismissals. The stumpings alone are ranked at India T20I most stumpings.

No India keeper has passed a dismissal a match by a comfortable margin over a long career. Dhoni's 1.09 across 77 matches is the only large-sample figure on the list, and it sits close to the middle of the rate column rather than at the top.

Six of the nine keepers here also played T20Is for India without the gloves. That is a modern selection pattern: India have often picked two keepers in an XI, one behind the stumps and one as a specialist batter, and the fielding records split accordingly. Catches those players took in the outfield are counted on the India T20I most catches page instead.

The turnover since Dhoni retired has been rapid. Five different keepers have taken the gloves for India in T20Is since 2020, and none has yet kept in more than 43 matches. Whether any of them reaches 84 dismissals depends less on ability than on holding the position for a decade, which nobody has managed since. The longer history of the role is covered on the great India wicketkeepers page, and the format's development on the history of T20 international cricket in India page. Individual careers are indexed at the player directory, and the wider setting at the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

All dismissal figures are computed from ball-by-ball match data in the Cricsheet archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), covering 276 India men's T20Is played between 1 December 2006 and 26 July 2026. Cricsheet lacks ball-by-ball files for a small number of India's earliest T20Is, so Dhoni's totals here sit slightly below the figures published by ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru, which records 91 dismissals from 98 matches. His stumping total of 34 matches Statsguru exactly.

Cricsheet does not flag which fielder was keeping wicket. The keeper for each match is identified here as the recognised keeper in India's named XI, resolved by stumping credit in the matches where more than one keeper played. Catches taken by that player in that match count as keeper catches; catches taken by any other India fielder do not. A player who kept in some matches and fielded in others is credited only for the matches he kept.

Dismissals are catches plus stumpings. Run-outs are excluded, as they are in the standard wicketkeeping record, because a run-out is a shared act between fielder and keeper and is not conventionally credited to the gloves. Dismissals per match divides by matches kept rather than by matches played. The home split counts matches at grounds in India; neutral venues count as overseas. Figures were computed in August 2026.